The Merchant

It’s all about the eye—and the numbers.

Mickey Drexler (standing left, in jeans), the C.E.O. of J. Crew, with staff members, at the company’s offices in downtown Manhattan. He says, “Clothes can talk—you know what I mean?”

Photograph by Max Vadukul

“Can I have your attention, please? Can I have your attention, please?” A dozen or so times a day at J. Crew headquarters, in Manhattan, a voice comes over the intercom with a low-fidelity reverb that brings to mind a muezzin’s call to prayer. The voice convenes meetings, assigns tasks, quotes customers, congratulates colleagues, and remarks on the weather and the news. It discusses moccasins, overalls, belts, boatnecks, peaches, Apple, Lady Gaga, sizes, colors, styles, seams, competitors, operating margins, units per transaction, and average dollar sales. It wants to know where the puck is going. It wants to pan for gold. It wants to see people moving briskly about the office, with intent and purpose, except at that particular moment, when it wants them to pay attention. It wants them to return their e-mails and calls. It wants everything considered done.

The voice belongs to Millard Drexler, the chairman and C.E.O. of J. Crew Group, Inc., who is known to everyone as Mickey, and who, when he took over the company, seven years ago, had the loudspeaker system set up in the company’s offices, near St. Marks Place, in order to communicate more directly with his charges. Wherever Drexler is—and he is more often on his feet than at his desk—he can disseminate his voice via cell phone; an assistant patches him in. A trace of the Bronx in the voice allays any hint of surveilling menace, as does the folksy, familiar, self-mocking manner, and the fact that for the most part the voice is talking about clothes.

Drexler, who is sixty-six, often speaks in sentence fragments, or in paragraphs made of tangents. He’ll start an idea, and before resolving it go off to another, and then another. He can sound as though he’s having several conversations at once. He has pet phrases and sayings of the week, some of them hoary locker-room maxims, such as “Play to win, not not to lose,” that out of the mouth of a good coach, or a tinny loudspeaker system, can still sound apt. “That’s life in America,” he says sometimes, in recognition of implacable mercantile difficulties, as though citing the laws of nature or the will of God. One morning, he let everyone know that he’d had a dream the night before about the color heather gray.

On a rainy day in May, Drexler and his team of designers and merchants crowded into a shack on a pier in Maine, where a small group of local seamstresses, in the employ of a company called Sea Bags, was stitching totes, duffels, and dopp kits out of old sails; the New Yorkers were swarming the goods, like discriminating pirates. They arranged bags on the floor in order to choose a few to feature in the J. Crew catalogue. “This is why you come and you see and you feel,” Drexler said. He stood over it all, rocking a little on his heels, his lips moving silently, his body a kind of divining rod. He turned to the bags’ designers and said, “Here’s what I’m thinking—should we talk?” His barrage of questions barely left time for answers. “Where in the world do you sell your bags? Is there an iconic or a famous Sea Bag? In five years, do you repeat? Is this your logo? Do we have time to do this today? Can we just work? Should we just grab the things we like?” The arrangement on the floor grew. “Let’s see less depth, more assortment,” he said. “Bring out some more stripes and numbers.” More bags appeared, emblazoned with stripes and numbers. “This is like discovering gold. This is it. Loudspeaker, please.”

In New York, the voice came out of the walls. “Can I have your attention, please? Can I have your attention, please? We are—where are we?—we are on Custom House Wharf, at the international headquarters of Sea Bags, in Portland harbor.” He described the scene, including the presence, right out the back door, of docked lobster boats, which to his eyes lent the operation, and really the entire episode, the kind of transitive authenticity that he yearns for in his life and his work. “The vibe is amazing. We’re bringing home some bags. And we’re going to do an amazing story.”

In some respects, the voice isn’t Drexler’s alone; he’s just a conduit. The ceaseless merchant murmur—the conversation between want and need, aspiration and means, product and price—that runs like a river through the heavily tilled plains and alluvial flats of American commerce pours through the thundering gorge of his mind. He hears it constantly, and has for as long as he can remember. “Creativity runs on automatic, no matter what’s happening in other parts of my life,” he told me. “I can’t help myself. It’s been in me, and it evolves in me over the years. It’s a condition in me.”

In the nineties, Drexler became known as the Merchant Prince, for his transformation of the Gap from a shaggy little jeans chain to a gigantic but fairly nimble purveyor of the stuff everyone wears. For better or for worse, he helped transform the way Americans dress, or underdress; khakis and casual Fridays may go back decades (the latter supposedly began as “Aloha Fridays,” in Hawaii in the sixties), but Drexler, the theory goes, put the two together and determined—in the merchant’s sense both of discovering and of guiding—the taste of the time. In 2002, however, amid a decline in the Gap’s fortunes, Drexler was fired. He wound up, less than a year later, at the helm of J. Crew, a much smaller company, which had been mired in struggles of its own. Its subsequent revival, as a business and a brand, has given him some measure of vindication and extra eminence, as well as wealth of another magnitude, and an evolving opportunity for the creative disposition of it. “Success” is often just a fancy word for “luck,” but a recurrence of it suggests the subsistence of design.

More than once, I asked Drexler to define “merchandising.” Sometimes he’d put the question to one of his junior merchants, who had perhaps got some of their definitions from the loudspeaker. “It’s telling America what to buy,” one told him. “It’s about investing in something and then selling it,” another said. These seemed to strike him as too prosaic or crass. They made no mention of the eye or the gut or of the throbbing sensation that comes over you when you see something that you are sure will sell, and sell out. One night last spring, he got to see an early cut of a documentary about Bill Cunningham, the Times photographer who bicycles around New York taking pictures of sneakily ubiquitous clothing items or styles, and came away thinking that Cunningham, no investor or salesman by any stretch, is an excellent merchant, in the way that he recognizes, collates, and presents the early evidence of a trend.

“A merchant is someone who figures out how to select, how to smell, how to identify, how to feel, how to time, how to buy, how to sell, and how to hopefully have two plus two equal six,” Drexler told me. “We buy and sell goods. We buy low and sell higher—that’s what we all do to make a profit. But I consider a merchant someone who has a certain intuition and instinct, and—very important—knows how to run a business, knows the numbers. Does the merchandise speak to you numerically? There’s a rhythm. You see goods as numbers. You see stores as numbers. And the numbers have to work out.”

The merchant must choose which goods to carry, in which assortments and colors, and at what price. It is a matter equally of capital allocation and taste. Drexler told me about a guy who operates a shoe company, who had just come to see him for advice. Drexler had chided him for running out of a shoe that was hot and overordering one that was not. “I said, ‘Why the hell would you buy the brown shoe more than the gray shoe? Clearly, the gray one looks better.’ He doesn’t know that. I know it. Because it’s internal. Or it’s external. But one shoe’s better than the other. It’s basically putting together a painting. And you cannot argue with a painting. You can’t debate what the right color is. There’s no answer. There’s no committee.”

When Drexler was ten, his father bought a red-and-white two-tone Buick Special. “We pick up the thing, and they had the wrong color,” he told me one morning. “It was cream instead of white. I’m thinking, I hate this car. Why is he accepting this car? It’s a mistake. And for seven fucking years we had that car.” He had intended for the story to illustrate the precocity of his aesthetic discernment, but it struck me that he may have projected onto that Buick some of his resentment toward his father, about which by now he had told me a good deal. “I have no idea why it concerned me so much,” he said. “My annoyance was an indication not of my father’s accepting the wrong thing but of the car looking the wrong way.”

Drexler ascribes his particular blend of insecurity, intuition, and drive to a sour and covetous youth. “Deprivation,” he calls it. “Being in a certain life and imagining another life.” This scenario is not exactly unique. The top echelon of American business is a Rushmore of unhappy childhoods. But each unhappy childhood, you could say, is unhappy in its own way.

Drexler was an only child. His father served in Europe in the Second World War, and returned home to meet his son for the first time when Mickey was eighteen months old. That same year, his mother was given a diagnosis of breast cancer. Throughout his childhood, his mother was sick and depressed; she worked full-time, in an era when very few women worked at all, as a secretary at the Y.M.H.A., in part, Drexler believes, to distract herself from her ill health. (She died, of esophageal cancer, when Drexler was sixteen.) The family lived in a one-bedroom apartment on Barnes Avenue, in the Williamsbridge section of the Bronx. Drexler slept on a cot in the foyer. But because of his mother’s illness and work he spent most of his time in the apartments nearby of her three sisters. This summer, Drexler gave me the transcript of an interview that his wife, Peggy, a psychologist, did with him, for her book “Raising Boys Without Men,” in 2003. (The idea, as she says in the interview, was that he was “raised not by one mother but by four.”) At one point, he talks about how his aunts sometimes treated him better than they did their own children. They saw something in him. He was one of five students in his class of two hundred and thirty, at P.S. 76, to pass the test to get into Bronx Science, an élite public high school. “That gave me the air of being the smartest one in the family,” he told Peggy. Still, he was an average student. He was insecure about his middling academic performance, and aware suddenly of a certain kind of privilege. “I thought, Gee, kids have their own bedrooms.” The Drexlers moved to Yonkers for two years, in part to give Mickey a bedroom, but Mickey, stranded, carless, his mother dying, was miserable there.

Friends and reporters have tended to point out that Drexler followed his father into the garment business. This is technically true but fundamentally misleading. His father did indeed work in the garment trade, as a button and remnants buyer for Jill Jr. Coats, in the Garment District, but there was nothing in his father’s experience there, or in the son’s impression of that experience, to inspire the son to want to emulate it. Instead, Drexler dreamed of getting clear of it. His father worked six days a week, and, when home, talked about little else besides work and whatever grievances were generated there. “He was the kind of guy who would try to be bigger than he was, always,” Drexler said. “He tried to give the impression of being important, of being a high-paid guy, which he wasn’t.” His father, who died in 1991, was an impeccable dresser; he strained, at least, to look the part. (Drexler, too, as a boy was always nattily dressed.) But there wasn’t any money, or much else to make up for the lack of it. “There was no warmth or emotion in my home,” Drexler told me. “My father was a bitter, angry man.” The father obsessed over money, as his own parents had. (Drexler’s grandparents had emigrated from Poland and Russia.) “In his eyes, everyone was rich,” Drexler recalled. “Everyone but us.” The owner of Jill Jr. Coats was a Mr. Cohen, who lived on Park Avenue and drove a Cadillac. “All it took to be rich was a Cadillac. And then, if you lived on Park Avenue, holy shit!”

To the extent that any man’s emphasis on his own genuinely humble beginnings can acquire a veneer of affectation, you might say that Drexler prizes the signalling implications of the Bronx; his embrace of its lessons and privations, as a basis for his approach to life and business, is as vigorous as his urge to escape them was. One day, at Drexler’s urging, I had lunch with three of his childhood friends from the Bronx—a retired city cop, a liquor distributor, and a traffic-court judge. Each of them had got back in touch with him thirty or so years ago, after reading about the Gap in the paper. He still sees them for lunch a few times a year. One of them said, “I thought of the Drexlers as the ideal, sophisticated American family. The father was the best-dressed father I knew.” Another said, “Everyone was rich compared to me.”

Drexler worked weekends and summers at Jill Jr. Coats doing errands. One day, it was his job to take the payroll envelopes to the bank. He couldn’t resist peeking inside. His father, he discovered, was making fifteen thousand dollars a year. “I was fucking devastated,” Drexler told me. “He was making less than all the guys he was putting down all the time. Shelly the salesman was making more than him. I was furious at his boss.”

Over time, however, Drexler has also come to realize that his father may not have been very smart or talented, that maybe he hadn’t deserved to be paid any more than he was. Drexler told his wife in 2003, “He was a selfish, ungracious human being, but I think through his ambition to be a successful person or a big shot in his own mind—that probably instilled a lot of ambition in me . . . to be, psychologically, not like he was.”

As it happened, Drexler was the only one, in his generation of seven cousins, to go to college. He enrolled at City College, but during his freshman year his father remarried and moved to his new wife’s house in Great Neck, a prosperous Long Island suburb. She had a Cadillac. For a time, Drexler commuted to school from there. He regarded that household as a wicked, lunatic place, for reasons he will not discuss. His stepmother charged him (but not his step-siblings) rent, and Drexler fantasized that his father was saving the rent money for him. (The situation recalls the roughly contemporaneous farce “Cinderfella,” starring Jerry Lewis as a mistreated stepchild.) He wrote his father long letters complaining about his stepfamily, but, as Drexler said, “My father thought he’d died and gone to Heaven. He had no pleasure in me.” Mickey fled Great Neck, and City College, for Buffalo, where he got his degree from the state university there.

Afterward, he enrolled in business school, at Boston University, where he met Peggy, an undergraduate, while helping a friend move. He had a job at Gilchrist’s, a department store. “I knew my first day there that it was going bankrupt,” he said. “There was less excitement there than a funeral home might have.” But during the summer he worked at Abraham & Straus, in the young men’s jeans department, and something took. “I loved the professionalism,” he said. “I loved the energy. I loved being on the selling floor. I loved learning, I loved asking questions. It was like I went to Heaven.”

The following summer, after he finished graduate school, A. & S. asked him to come back, in a position paying eleven thousand dollars a year. A classmate whom Drexler had hooked up with a job there was offered eleven thousand five hundred. “I’d worked there for a summer and they’re already valuing him more than me? I was furious,” he said. Drexler had also interviewed at Bloomingdale’s, which offered him a job, at eleven thousand five hundred. He took that one instead. “It wasn’t the money per se. I looked at it more as justice—fairness. I didn’t want to be my father. I didn’t want to be taken advantage of.” Personal pique served him well; Bloomingdale’s was on the rise, the emporium to a thriving Upper East Side. The buyer in the junior-sportswear department—clothes for teen-age girls, about which Drexler knew nothing—was on maternity leave, and he filled in. “I found myself with a few very hot items,” he recalled. “I’ll never forget, there was an elephant-pant. It was a pull-on, wide-cuffed pant in a bunch of colors, and it sold like crazy. So I was reordering every day. I was chasing a trend.”

Promotions ensued—to a branch in New Rochelle, and then, relievingly, back to Manhattan. “I think I was the youngest, fastest-promoted buyer in the history of Bloomingdale’s,” he said. “I was so excited I cried on the phone when I told my wife.” Still, a restlessness had taken hold. Every time his wife called, he hoped it was someone calling to tell him he’d been promoted again. He felt, perpetually, that he could do his bosses’ jobs better than they did: “I always expected more of them than I got.”

In 1976, after he had moved to Macy’s and was earning a salary of fifty thousand dollars as a group buyer, he and Peggy bought an apartment on Park Avenue, a two-bedroom in the back of a prewar co-op on Carnegie Hill. The elderly woman in the apartment next door to theirs had a buzzer she’d ring to summon the help, and, because the apartments had once been joined, the buzzer could also be clearly heard in the Drexlers’ apartment. For whatever reason, the Drexlers never complained or had it fixed.

“Can I have your attention, please? The women’s meeting is happening now.” J. Crew’s investment meetings, known as “finalization,” for the 2010 holiday line took place over two days in May. Once summoned, the company’s merchants, designers, and planners, as well as an assortment of personal shoppers and store managers from around the region, packed into a showroom on the eleventh floor at J. Crew headquarters. The first day was devoted to the women’s line. Ringing the room were samples on mannequins, hangers, and tables, in stations organized by category: sweaters, knits, dresses, and so on. A display of jeans hung on hooks: toothpick, skinny slouch, matchstick, boot-cut, leggy denim. Rows of folding chairs, occupied mostly by alert young women attired in J. Crew, faced front, where Drexler sat, intermittently BlackBerrying and scanning the room in search of impromptu conversation. He wore what he always wears: a heather-gray T-shirt, a striped Thomas Mason blue-and-white button-down with the shirttails out, slim, artfully aged Swedish jeans, and Alden cordovan wingtips. He believes that a man needs a uniform, and this is his; he gave up wearing suits years ago, as soon as he could. The stubble on his chin and over his ears was gray.

At finalization, the company’s merchants present to Drexler samples of the goods they’ve decided to order from the company’s designers—what colors and sizes and in what numbers—and what they intend to charge for them. “We’re here to value the goods right,” Drexler said. He peppers the merchants with questions, in a kind of commercial catechism designed both to refine the decisions being made and to instruct his charges in the rigors of merchandising. His inquisitions have an auctioneer’s tempo and a depositional intensity, but they also project an ease that derives from the pleasure he seems to take in them, and the pleasure, albeit of a wary and poised kind, that his employees seem to take in him. Some combination of self-possession, insecurity, good humor, and good tailoring makes him approachable. His command of a room is sneaky; it is unexpectedly fortified by curiosity and self-effacement. He shrugs a lot, and his eyes dart around for affirmation, for extra-conversational sparks and nods. His posture—shoulders and head reared slightly back, like George Washington in John Trumbull’s painting of Washington resigning as Commander-in-Chief—projects a preference for input over output, even when he’s letting loose his queries and dictums. His employees use his first name a lot when responding to his questions, as though he were a chat-show host and they were media-trained. Sometimes, little brushfires of conversation erupt, and Drexler snaps his fingers and extinguishes them. The way he orchestrated the finalization meeting reminded me a little of Phil Donahue.

The first hour finalized nothing, however, and was instead a free-ranging discussion, with stretches of soliloquy, that circumscribed a point Drexler wanted to make about the perception of J. Crew, in the room and in the marketplace. “Every day, I feel I can’t keep up,” Drexler began. “But then I start to feel, Am I keeping up? Is it important to keep up? I live my life, and I can’t read every blog. But, O.K., so I hear about Essie nail polish. How many of you wear Essie nail polish? By the way, I’m supposed to get my first manicure on Saturday.” He looked at me with embarrassment. “I don’t know if I’m gonna do it.” This led him to asides about the low cost of pedicures and manicures (“the best deal in America”), the fact that other companies were now copying J. Crew’s designs (“It’s O.K., that’s the world”), the implications of the film version of “Freakonomics” (“I thought it was gimmicky”), the integrity of the actress Catherine Keener (a roomful of women exclaiming, “Oh, she’s great!”), and the integrity of J. Crew’s goods (“What the customers are paying for is the perception of value. Stitch by stitch, fabric by fabric, we offer the most value”), all by way of advancing the idea that, as he put it, “our name is worth more than we internally think. Clothes can talk, you know what I mean?” What the clothes were telling him, apparently, was that J. Crew may not be charging customers enough for them. He mentioned some competitors and said, “They sell at five times cost. We sell for three times cost.”

J. Crew was founded as a mail-order business in 1983 by Arthur Cinader, the scion of a catalogue fortune; his daughter Emily Scott, who became its chief designer, espoused a dependable and unpretentious preppy aesthetic, part L. L. Bean, part Ralph Lauren, that won it a loyal following among baby boomers and college students who became accustomed to finding the cotton roll-neck sweater in hunter or plum. “The premise was to make the kinds of clothes I really wanted to wear but just couldn’t find,” Scott once said. In the late nineties, the company foundered, and Cinader sold a majority stake to the Texas Pacific Group, a giant private-equity firm, which went through several C.E.O.s before hiring Drexler, soon after the Gap fired him. Drexler had turned down a severance package, in order to avoid any constraints it might put on him. He invested ten million dollars of his own money in J. Crew for a ten-per-cent stake, which was worth a hundred and thirty-six million dollars when the company went public, in 2006.

Drexler has gradually tried to elevate the brand, in terms of the quality and the price of its goods. In particular, the women’s clothes, in the past five years, have acquired some cachet in the fashion world, making Jenna Lyons, the creative director, and now the company president, something of an unlikely celebrity, in a chastened, recessionary marketplace. J. Crew has developed a higher-priced line called the Collection, with six-hundred-dollar dresses, and now espouses sequins, ruffles, baubles, and heels: a bit of glam, to doll up the boatnecks and jeans. Several years ago, Drexler also started Madewell, an edgier, more trend-driven line. Drexler constantly wants to know what the fashionistas are into. Lyons told me, “He likes it that he gets to hang with the cool people. He gets to hang with Alexa Chung and walk into a party and see the guys from Rag & Bone.” When J. Crew outfitted Michelle, Sasha, and Malia Obama for the Inauguration, Lyons didn’t tell Drexler about it until the day before, out of concern that Drexler, a keen gossip, wouldn’t be able to keep it a secret. (Generally, J. Crew doesn’t buy advertising. It has the catalogue, and then the display space—windows, walls, register—in the stores.)

As it happens, some women I know had been grumbling to me that J. Crew, under Drexler, had started charging too much. I’d heard complaints, in person and on J. Crew blogs—yes, there are J. Crew fan blogs—that the quality of some of the clothes, especially the T-shirts, was not commensurate with the price, and that, say, a seventy-two-dollar striped boatneck tee had, after a couple of washings, started to develop holes at the seams. Drexler has heard such complaints, and they bring out the dervish in him. They often come straight to his e-mail in-box, and he seeks to answer every e-mail, or he passes it off to a colleague. Every day, he carries on multiple conversations, by BlackBerry or phone, with several customers whose experiences with J. Crew have come to his attention. He is maniacal about customer service.

He disdains surveys. “I like to prove things wrong,” he said. “We don’t think we need outside agencies, architects, or consultants.” Instead, he relies on his own market research, which is relentless, idiosyncratic, and unstatistical; his sample group is whoever passes through his life or his in-box. His discovery that some women were buying multiple copies of a dress for their bridesmaids gave him the idea to launch a bridal line, which has been very successful, and which culminated, last spring, in the opening of a bridal store, on the Upper East Side. “That’s how everything starts: one guy who asks. Depends on the guy, of course,” he said one day in a meeting. “I was thinking this morning, a caveman wakes up one day and has an idea, and there’s a butcher shop, and then time goes by and you get grocery stores and so on. The first butcher shop: some guy invented it.”

The input isn’t always helpful. One customer’s lament about sizing can set off a chain reaction of recrimination and redesign at headquarters that, with the arrival moments later of another customer’s effusive praise, will come to an abrupt halt. The employees at J. Crew have a saying, “Don’t read lips,” which means that they ought not take every one of Drexler’s utterances and whims too literally. They have to learn how to discriminate among them.

Drexler is an avid interviewer. He is suspicious of a fancy education, although he is proud that his daughter is attending an Ivy League college this fall. (He and Peggy also have a son, who is thirty-two, and works in fashion production.) He thinks that business school is a waste of time. He prefers to hear that someone waited tables. It can be a long interview, but he’s a quick study. “I once hired a guy,” a friend of his recalled. “Mickey walked into my office and spent five minutes with him. He came out and said, ‘Get rid of that fucking guy. He doesn’t get it.’ It took me three months to do it. Mickey likes to say, ‘If you’re gonna fire somebody, fire him right away.’ ”

“I just try to be nice to people . . . because I felt that maybe my father wasn’t that nice to me,” Drexler told his wife, in their 2003 interview. “I do not like people who do not treat other people with respect.” He also said, “Personally, I like working with women more than men, because I find they are more intuitive and have a better sense of instinct about a lot of things.” He added, “I find throughout my life that most men are not nurturing. They’re not patient about their words or their encouragement. Men don’t take as much of an interest in people as women do.” He made an exception for gay men: “I don’t know any successful fashion company that’s surrounded by a cadre of straight guys. There’s no touch. There’s no feel. I hope it doesn’t sound prejudicial, but that’s a fact of life and I can’t argue with it.”

One morning in 1983, Drexler found himself sitting in an office park in San Bruno, California, overlooking a cemetery, an airport, and an interstate. What am I doing here? he wondered to himself. Why’d I do this? He was thirty-nine, and it was his first day as the president of the Gap. It was a Monday. On the previous Friday, he’d been in midtown Manhattan, serving his last day as the president of Ann Taylor, where he’d landed after Macy’s. A turnaround at Ann Taylor, on his watch, had earned him the ardent attentions of Donald Fisher, the Gap’s founder, and the impetus to leave New York. The vertigo of relocation and advancement stayed with Drexler for at least a year.

“You come to work and you say to yourself, Oh, my God, how do I get through my everyday life right now?” he told me. “Do you know what that does to your body and soul?” He got through it the way a lot of people do: he lived what he called a parallel life, one anxious and miserable, the other assured and cheerful. (“Now my life is not so parallel,” he says.) Being a New York guy, he found that many things about the Bay Area, including the expression “the Bay Area,” annoyed him: the focus on fitness and the weather, all the biking up and down mountains. “There’s more to life than a weather report,” he told me. “Every week, they had a ski week.” He also missed his acerbic friends, “the openness of New York, the spilling of the guts, in the extreme.” He said, “There’s no one to laugh with in San Francisco.”

In time, he warmed to California and thrived at the Gap. He redid everything—the clothes, the stores, the advertising—and redirected the brand toward a clean, classic aesthetic of so-called “casual chic.” The famous Gap khakis campaign, which invoked Miles Davis and Jack Kerouac rather than, say, the sales manager in the next cubicle, became a kind of Clinton-era sartorial blueprint: prosperity and informality and a spurious claim on cool, all of it enabled by a post-Cold War explosion in the global pool of cheap labor. The New World Order wore khakis. “It was never conscious that we were re-dressing the world,” Drexler said. He was, instead, furiously chasing better comps—that is, the change in comparable sales, during the same period a year earlier, in the same stores. He invented new companies and businesses under the aegis of the Gap, such as GapKids and Old Navy, which, over the objections of Fisher, he named for a bar he saw in France, and which today provides the Gap with the biggest share of its sales. Drexler also transformed Banana Republic, the recently acquired purveyor of safari curios, into another mainstream retail giant.

Throughout it all, he maintained a fraught relationship with Fisher, a strong-willed patriarch sixteen years his senior. Fisher may have chafed at the acclaim that came Drexler’s way as the company boomed, and, certainly, the two men had different approaches to life and business, which set off hundreds of tiny battles. Fisher’s sons eventually occupied high positions in the company, which further complicated his relationship with Drexler, the corporate stepson, who was at times favored and at others not. Still, Drexler made Fisher and his heirs billionaires. So when, in 2002, after seven years as C.E.O., Drexler was finally fired—and the company, to this day, maintains that he was not—it came as a brutal shock.

The company had grown too fast into the teeth of a recession, and Drexler had made a bet on edgier merchandise, which didn’t pan out. “It was like running a government,” a friend of Drexler’s told me. “But, then again, Gap had got so big because of him.”

“My last two years there, it was the most challenging business experience I’ve had in my life,” Drexler told me. “You feel like you’re failing, and there’s no safety net. I focussed like I’ve never focussed before. I said to myself, because who else you gonna say it to, Self, I’m not this stupid. I’ll do what has to be done. Concurrently, you’re saying, How can I get out of here?” The firing had a silver lining—“It made it easier for me to leave,” he says—but in truth it was a miserable and shaming experience. Although he waves away such talk, it is inarguable that Drexler, upon coming to J. Crew, wanted to stick it to the Fishers. The fact that he has flourished at J. Crew, while the Gap, in his absence, has languished a bit, has been an affirmation—perhaps a more significant source of inner peace than regular private sessions he has with a yogi. When Fisher died, last year, Drexler lost a touchstone and an audience. Still, he and the Gap remain on a cold-war footing. Anytime he made an aside, in a meeting, about the Gap—about, say, the agita brought on by the sight of an anorak—he requested that it be off the record.

For the most part, candor comes naturally to Drexler, and he has chosen not to labor as hard as some others in public life to pinch it down. In a business capacity, this means that his conference calls at earnings time, or his conversations with colleagues, are uncommonly frank. He told me this spring, amid a lot of rose-tinted talk from his competitors about the prospects for economic recovery and retail growth, “You’re either lying or stupid if you’re not scared shitless.”

“He leads his life like he’s one step ahead of the posse,” the financial commentator Jim Cramer told me. “He’s the most insecure C.E.O. in America, when he should be the most secure.” Drexler and Cramer met a few years ago in line at Dean & Deluca, on the Upper East Side, where Drexler had stopped for coffee on his way to drop his daughter off at school. Drexler said, “I love what you do.” Cramer, who is a retail obsessive, returned the compliment. “He understands the struggle,” Cramer told me, by which he meant the effort to do business and advance oneself in America.

Cramer became one in a rotating cast of neighborhood characters Drexler has “accidental coffee” with. They talk passionately about inventory. Drexler gave Cramer a Friends of J. Crew discount card, which he hands out like Chiclets. (Cramer says he doesn’t use it.) Cramer gushed about him on CNBC. Drexler hounds Cramer for feedback on the clothes he or his kids have bought. “The way he is, it’s like he owns one store in the Flatbush mall,” Cramer said. “I bought a suit jacket, and he says, ‘Whaddaya doing buying the jacket? Get the pants!’ So I get the pants. He goes, ‘So how are the pants?’ The pants? I mean, who cares? He cares.”

Men’s finalization came the day after women’s, in an adjacent showroom. Predictably, the meeting had more men in it, and an underbrush of Wallabees, Top-Siders, and Rod Laver tennis shoes. The cuffs on every pair of jeans were rolled up a turn or two, flashing a seam. When someone sneezed, everyone said, “Bless you.”

Recently, J. Crew has embarked on an effort to raise the fashion profile of the men’s line. In 2004, Drexler hired a Dutchman named Frank Muytjens from Ralph Lauren, to be his top men’s designer. Drexler often speaks of wanting J. Crew to be “famous” for this or that item. The starlet of the hour is the Ludlow Suit, a slim-cut Italian wool suit that, at six hundred dollars, splits the difference between fancy and cheap. It has been a best-seller in the stores that carry it and helped earn Muytjens a nomination from GQ for the designer of the year.

Drexler was up front, leaning back in a chair, drinking coffee, kibbitzing with some of his favorite salespeople about their home towns and haircuts. (“That’s the thing about New York: there’s always someone with a better haircut.”) He has a way of fetishizing his salespeople, as pushers of the goods and as acute antennae; they have first-hand experience not only with inventory and its discontents but also with the mercurial tastes and anxieties of the customers. Today, a salesman from Boston was telling him that the sales staff at Barneys had been shopping at the J. Crew store in Copley Square. Drexler quizzed a model named John, who would be trying on some of the samples for the team. Drexler had worked with him for more than ten years, and knew that he also modelled for J. Crew’s competitors. Drexler asked him, “Do they talk about us in their meetings?”

“Everybody knows what’s going on out there,” John said. “You guys have a big target on your backs.”

“So what was the overriding issue to come out of the meeting yesterday?” Drexler began. “Retail pricing? No. Value? No. Small things we can make better? No. Wait, you didn’t hear about it?” Jenna Lyons arrived, apologizing, and took her seat near Drexler. Muytjens sat off to the side. He had salt-and-pepper stubble, thick-framed glasses, cropped hair, and a gentle disposition. He was wearing torn jeans, brown Alden wingtips, a gray T-shirt, and a heavy denim shirt with lots of buttons and pockets; apparently, the Canadian tuxedo is à la mode. “So, I was saying,” Drexler continued. “What was the overriding question? Don’t give away the answer. Here’s the deal: Are we getting the value we’re worth?” Without providing or waiting for an answer, he went on, “I got this incredible thing last night. Someone sent me an umbrella and a suitcase. They’re from Swaine Adeney Brigg, in London. The umbrella—I don’t know what they sell for.”

“Eight hundred dollars,” someone said.

“Thank you,” Drexler said. “This guy who sent it to me, he’s an integrity freak. I’m saying to myself, I will never leave this umbrella in a restaurant umbrella holder. I’ll probably never even use it. The integrity, though! I’m thinking, There’s a whole other world out there. Who’s gonna spend eight hundred dollars on an umbrella? There are people who will.” He tried to think of companies that have managed to produce both high-quality goods and high-quality profits (one of his favorite sayings is “No profit, no fun”) and mentioned Hermès. “But, in America, I don’t know what’s left. The pressure to make money sometimes makes integrity hard.”

He talked for a while about men’s suits, about the catalogue for the new kids’ line (“I have to say, I got my Crewcuts catalogue in the mail. It’s not that bold. Is there something wrong with the light? It looked kind of faded”), footwear (“And, by the way, you oughta invent the category: sneakers to wear as shoes”), and a line of Haiti T-shirts sold for charity. (“When does concern for Haiti expire? I’ll tell you my answer: who the hell knows? Let the customer tell you when it’s over.”) He and his staff talked about an idea for iPad cases, and about store layout (“Women will hunt through a rack. Ever seen a guy hunt through a rack? He probably lost his keys. Guys don’t hunt through racks”), and about reports from the salesmen that men were asking for shirts with slimmer cuts—even in the Midwest. “You’re telling me guys are asking for slimmer shirts,” Drexler said. “Slimmer shirts: that’s where the puck is going. Get ready to launch slim shirts. All a guy needs to hear is, Slim shirts are in. The New Slim. If we were in the doughnut business, it would be like selling no glazed doughnuts.”

Drexler at one point interrupted the proceedings to read aloud from an e-mail he’d got from a customer complaining that no one, including J. Crew, sold good leggings. While I wondered what exactly leggings were, Drexler produced the customer from the wings. She had introduced herself to him after he gave a talk at a university, and here she was, delivering her civilian’s view of a J. Crew shortcoming, to a roomful of its top executives and designers. There ensued a colloquy on leggings. Leggings aren’t raw meat, and this was no cave, but the question stirred in Drexler the thought of invention and opportunity. It appeared that someone in the room, by meeting’s end, would quietly take on the task of developing a business in leggings. “Any other issues?” Drexler asked her, finally.

“I had issues with suiting, because I have a full balcony,” the woman said. “My proportions are different.”

“Everyone has different proportions,” Drexler said. “That’s life in America.”

“Or, we’ve been undervaluing.” He remarked, “A guy, once he trusts the brand, he doesn’t worry about the price. We know there’s a God of retail pricing looking over us all. ‘They’re worrying about price. But the only time I will strike is when they sell it at ninety-eight fifty.’ ”

As Drexler moved on to chamois shirts, and as that subterranean commercial torrent poured forth, ranking blue above black and gray, and finding seventy-nine fifty preferable to seventy-two fifty—“How many units? How many colors? What’s your margin? What’s your price?”—my mind was visited by another, complementary voice: that of the universal customer. I found myself checking out the merchandise. The customer voice, to my ears anyway, is covetous, skeptical, cautious, and a little cheap. Nice . . . I don’t know . . . no way. A lot of people like to think they’re not interested in clothes, and yet they are likely preoccupied or even vexed by their own. Who doesn’t occasionally linger at the closet door, wondering what, if anything, there is to wear? Every shirt, it seems, has a flaw: a tacky sheen, a tight armpit, an uppity collar, or an unfortunate epaulet. When you realize you’ve found one you like, you wish you’d bought ten, but very often you can’t find it again, as sizes and styles change. Damn shirts.

The goods on display here, at finalization, gave me the rare sensation of wanting to buy stuff, even if the voice in my head was often at odds with that of the guy running the meeting. Madras? No. But who was I? Jenna Lyons noted, on several occasions but with some kindness, that my clothes were too big for me. I bought a few things at the J. Crew men’s store on Broadway that I thought looked pretty good, but even that mini-makeover inspired Lyons one day to look with a grimace at the shoulder of one of the shirts and to say, “That extra half inch, for me, is like a typo on a résumé for you.” The fact is, most of us settle for what we have and fuss around at the margins. We take the Buick in cream.

One could probably assemble a college syllabus out of the collected rationalizations of wealthy men who have accumulated a great deal. Drexler would make for a tricky week. Some rich guys play golf, some take models to restaurants, and some hang around the Council on Foreign Relations. Drexler collects houses. He is, as he puts it, “autistic about real estate.” He currently owns an apartment on Park Avenue, in the East Sixties; a house on Harbor Island, in the Bahamas; another in Sun Valley, Idaho; and three on Long Island’s East End, including Eothen, Andy Warhol’s estate in Montauk, which he bought in 2007 for just under thirty million dollars. (He heads out to Long Island on summer weekends, either by helicopter or by car.) Every one of them was either built or renovated by Thierry Despont, a renowned architect and interior designer to the Gulfstream class. “The process of creating and imagining is as much fun as the visiting and staying,” Drexler told me. “It is not about a materialistic chase. It is not about that. You know what it is? It’s not greedy. Growing up, I was always wanting a nice place to live. I don’t want to sound like a schmuck. I don’t buy art. I’d rather buy a beautiful location or a beautiful site than buy art. A beautiful home is like owning a beautiful painting, except you can live in it.”

In July, he invited me out to visit him at his house on the shore of Sagg Pond, in Bridgehampton, which he and Peggy bought in 2004. To get to it, you pass between a pair of garages holding a collection of vintage Land Rovers. Built in 1895 (it was the first one on the pond), the house is not in itself huge or opulent, but the prospect, out through the cut at the beach and the ocean, and the property—six acres, with wetlands, thickets, an orchard, two pools, and six outbuildings—are spectacular, in a just-so kind of way.

Drexler, in cargo shorts and an untucked button-down, greeted me with his dogs, a pair of yellow Labs named Stuart Little and Polly, and he led me on a tour of the grounds. There was a restored guesthouse, rarely disturbed by guests—“I’ve never hung out on this porch”—and behind it an herb garden the size of a stretch limousine. He stood looking at it for a second and then said, “Last time I was here, it could’ve been a year ago.” I asked him if it gave him any anxiety or regret not to have the time to savor all the vantages and nooks on this particular tract of land, to say nothing of those on all the other properties, and he said, “I grew up outside looking in. Now I’m on the inside. It’s nice to know it’s here.”

We sat at a table on a covered porch facing the pond. A chef brought out sliced peaches and plums from a farmer in California whom Drexler had identified as the best source of them in the country. “When I’m out here, I try to make as few plans as possible,” he said. “I’ve needed to learn how to chill.” Whenever he uses the word “chill,” the people around him laugh, because they are certain he does not understand what it means. He professes to like staying home most nights with his wife and his daughter. He will not talk about his family on the record. After weeks of my badgering, he allowed me to meet his wife, over lunch in Bridgehampton, but only if I agreed to keep the conversation off the record, his rationale being that they have come to an agreement that his thing is not her thing—that her career as an academic and an author should not in any way be subordinated to his. She came across as thoughtful, sober, wry, a little wary. This month, the Drexlers became empty nesters.

Drexler is gregarious but not highly social. He is an unpredictable accepter of invitations. He is hardly the shut-in he claims to be, to judge by the stories one hears from people who have sat next to him at dinner parties, but quite often he is a reluctant participant in or witness to the peacocking that comes with wealth and success. He wants to be invited. He’s mindful that people treat him a certain way, because he is a big shot or because they want to get closer to Steve Jobs. (Drexler has been on the board at Apple for eleven years.) He will mutter, off the record, about various well-known billionaires whose narcissism and ungraciousness he cannot abide, which he has encountered at close hand: “They think that the fact they made money means they’re smart.” He believes that a lot of people have piled up disgusting sums of money for producing or building nothing—for merely investing. Once you’ve made as much money as he’s made—in the stock market’s heady days, his net worth exceeded a billion dollars—you tend to wind up at dinner tables with other billionaires. (He never socializes with his colleagues at J. Crew; most of their spouses have never met him.) Still, in his 2003 interview with his wife, he said, “I just feel comfortable around people who are down to earth, not fancy, and I guess I am negative toward the fancy ones.” This is a funny thing to hear from a man who has three houses in the Hamptons.

If you walk around with him on the Upper East Side, chances are he’ll bump into wealthy friends. I had breakfast with him one morning at one of his customary spots, Sant Ambroeus, a Europhilic restaurant on Madison Avenue, and he muttered about the mercurial personality of a socialite who walked past without saying hello—the affront grated. Later, we ran into Steven Rattner, the investor, on the street. As it happens, the front page of the Times that morning had carried a story about the federal government’s pursuit of Rattner in a payola scandal involving the state-pension system. Drexler had heard about the Times story but hadn’t read it yet, and wasn’t sure, in the moment, what, if anything, he should say. It didn’t come up. They talked about their children, and clothes. Rattner had on a pair of J. Crew khakis, which Jenna Lyons might have thought were a size too big. Drexler pointed to a Bentley, with Florida plates, that was parked nearby, and said, “This car tells me sleaze.”

“Probably a schmatte merchant,” Rattner joked. In the car later, Drexler, curious, wondered whether his driver, a retired cop, could run the Bentley’s plate numbers.

Recently, J. Crew has been complementing its wares with selections from other, more time-tested names, such as Timex, Red Wing, Ray-Ban, Alden, and Belstaff. Red Wing was one of the first, three years ago. Drexler had admired Red Wing boots at Alley’s General Store, in West Tisbury, on Martha’s Vineyard, where he used to own a couple of houses, and noticed, as Lyons put it, that “all the guys on the design team were wearing the boots. What’s up with the boots?” His enthusiasm for Belstaff, a manufacturer of wax-treated-cotton weatherproof jackets for British motorcycle enthusiasts, originated in a chance encounter, on the street in SoHo, with a former colleague’s husband, who had been hired by Belstaff to launch an expanded apparel line in America.

The goal is for J. Crew to festoon its own brand, assert a kind of kindred spirit (the catalogue category is “In Good Company”), and accentuate its claim to classic Americana and transgenerational persistence. The guest brands also spruce up the catalogue, express more bluntly the company’s curatorial role, and give its customers a narrow selection of goods that J. Crew has no business trying to make itself. The heritage brands, as they are known in the rag trade, represent a fraction of J. Crew’s business—ten to fifteen per cent—but occupy a higher share of Drexler’s interest.

In May, Drexler went on a two-day blitz through the Midwest and New England, to visit the headquarters of some brands. He took his jet, a Gulfstream IV with an interior redesigned by Despont, which he charters to the company. The first stop was a meet-and-greet/show-and-tell at a moccasin-maker called Minnetonka, in Minneapolis. Moccasins of all colors and shapes and sizes soon cluttered a conference table, as the J. Crew team and the Minnetonka principals—father and son—discussed which ones suited J. Crew and what changes could be made to them. A pair of braided infant’s moccasins caused Drexler to exclaim, “Oh. My. God.” Drexler’s effusive expressions of enthusiasm for items of apparel tend to seem both sincere and rote, in the manner of a lead singer in a rock band greeting the home-town fans. He conveys zest and self-parody at the same time. I once heard him say, of a shoe, “By the way, this is beyond the beyond of all the beyond.”

A fourteen-minute flight deposited the team in the town of Red Wing, Minnesota, where we donned safety glasses for a tour of the factory. “Our boots are made for work,” David Murphy, the president, said. “Our best-seller is our 2231 steel-toed boot, for workers in the oil industry. B.P. is a good customer.” To illustrate the importance of a slip-resistant sole, he told a story of being on an offshore rig a few weeks before: he was in the kitchen, and the cook threw a chicken carcass over the side. Before it could even reach the water, a frenzy of fish erupted. “These fish were playing volleyball with this chicken.”

“So if you want to market Red Wing, why not open a store in New York City.”

“You think it’s a good idea?”

“No. I think it’s a mandatory idea,” Drexler said. “I’ll help you if you want.”

In the course of our travels, I observed a few instances of Drexler’s impatience and irritation. He scolded some employees by phone for not answering an e-mail quickly enough—“There’s an expectation that if it comes from my office it will be done without bureaucracy.” In Chicago, where Drexler was scouting a potential location for a new Madewell store (“You have to go, you have to see, you have to feel. Either it pays for the trip or it does not”), his driver had incomplete directions—a mere itinerary, with no local knowledge or scheme for traffic avoidance. Drexler called his assistant in New York and asked, “Who does that? Why would you do that? Don’t do it again.”

Drexler sweeps into J. Crew company stores with regularity—an upbeat generalissimo in an untucked shirt. Last spring, he learned, in an interview with a student, that Grand Avenue, in her home town of St. Paul, Minnesota, was an up-and-coming cool neighborhood. Drexler wondered about the store there. Its comps were lagging those of other stores in the region, as well as those of J. Crew as a whole. “Long story short, we’re probably not taking advantage of the opportunity there,” he said.

He stopped in during the Minnesota leg. The employees were ready for him. They gathered around him just inside as he hit them with questions. “Is this the neighborhood where the hip people shop? What store around here has the most goods? How does your customer compare? What percentage is college students? Wave a magic wand: what would you want here that you do not have?”

Someone mentioned that the next street over, Summit Avenue, was where F. Scott Fitzgerald had grown up. Drexler asked the store manager to rate herself, on a scale of one to ten, in terms of her comps, and she gave herself a six. He said, “A six will not get you to Summit Avenue.”

“What do you want from us?” he asked them. “The numbers prove we’re doing something wrong. What else are the customers asking for?”

The answer, delivered in a halting, uncaffeinated manner not entirely pleasing to Drexler, was that they wanted “some of the newer exciting stuff,” such as men’s suits, the Alden wingtip shoes, slim-cut pants. A saleswoman said, “We should have more relaxed-fit merchandise.”

“We’re not going there,” Drexler said.

He questioned the deployment of the sales staff. Only two of the store’s seventeen employees were personal shoppers, and yet they were doing twenty-six per cent of the store’s volume. He singled out one saleswoman. “Why are you not a personal shopper? I’m putting you on the spot.”

“Um . . . ”

“O.K. What about you?” he said, turning to another woman, who had been the most forthright respondent so far. “You seem to be the fashionista here. You seem to get it. How’d you get so hip?” It was abundantly clear that Drexler had quickly formed a kind of professional crush on her, amid a mounting mood of irritation at the lethargy that seemed to surround her. She was East African, with cropped hair and a mildly confident air. She explained that she had a second job, working as a stylist at a modelling agency in Minneapolis, and that she had recently helped a friend open a men’s-clothing shop nearby. “You don’t mind if we compete with your friend?” Drexler said. He tends to get excited around people who strike him as clever, opinionated, and indefatigable, in the way that a traveller in a hostile foreign land might thrill to an encounter with a fellow-countryman. “Hello! Hello! Time out,” Drexler said. “Where are the models? Do they have a discount? Where do they shop? Why not have an event here? Hello! A hundred models in here, shopping?” He told her to pursue the idea and e-mail him about her progress.

They toured the store, Drexler’s disenchantment mounting. A best-selling pair of pants was buried in the shirt section. Markdowns crowded out snappier items. “Is this—and I hate to use the word—is this the lowest common denominator? Are we undervaluing the customer who shops in this store? Yes we are.” As it happened, this was the last day of the season; the fall line was to arrive the next morning, making the day an unfortunate one for a visit from the boss. Still, he had no truck with any hint of an excuse—it was an example of what he calls “loser talk.” “It’s the last day, but other stores have remnants of cool.” He pointed to a floral romper. “Is that selling? What is that? Why is it in the best piece of real estate?” “Can you turn up the music, give us a little vibe here? Who tells you to put this here? Who’s in charge of the mannequins? You gotta redo every single mannequin in the store.” “Could you sell Belstaff here? Because you don’t have it. How do you know what you can sell if you never had it? Before Starbucks no one knew how even to pronounce ‘cappuccino.’ ”

All of this was delivered without bitterness or bile, but with a kind of pedagogical impatience—a math teacher peppering a droopy precalculus class. He whispered asides to his merchant team, and stepped away for BlackBerry hiatuses that were sure to set off recriminating e-mail tangents. At one point, Drexler said, “Put me on the loudspeaker, please.” He was patched into the intercom at J. Crew headquarters, where his charges suddenly heard the familiar incantation, the first of the day, “Can I have your attention, please. . . ” He name-checked his team and then declared, euphemistically, “We need to look for the opportunities in our stores for the customer who is a little out in front of us.” To the employees back in New York, it may have sounded as though the management of the Grand Avenue store faced a rearrangement. (Thierry Despont told me, “Mickey has a wonderful way of saying quietly that he’s not happy. In fact, the more courteous he gets, the more you should be worried.”)

After twenty-five minutes, the team swept out of the store and back into the van. Drexler and Lyons agreed that the visit had been disastrous, and they had a hushed discussion about how best to “jzooz” up the store. “Jzooz,” Lyons told me, was a Mickeyism for “going in like elves and making everything better.”

Later, as he was boarding the plane, he placed a call to a customer who had walked into the Grand Avenue store during his visit. She had sent him an e-mail immediately afterward. “I can’t believe you didn’t say hello, especially you being a New Yorker,” Drexler said. “He-llo! By the way, let me ask you something: Do you live near the Grand Avenue store? Hold on, let me get on the airplane. I’ll call you right back.” He dashed up the stairs and into the jet. “Hi, it’s me again. What do you do for room and board? You think you can help us? Where do you live? Are you a customer? Your daughter? Really? So you don’t wear our clothes? You are or aren’t a customer? You are. O.K. Why don’t you do this? Send me a résumé. If you’d said hello— It’s all right. Whatever. Think about what you might do at Grand Avenue.”

“Hello! Hello!” he called out, after hanging up. “You know what she said? She confirmed it all.” He shrugged and said, “I don’t want to make all this about Grand Avenue, but it happens to be Grand Avenue’s moment. In the total scheme, it’s just a small store, but all these small things add up to a big thing.”

In Lewiston, Maine, we found our selves, the next morning, on the shop floor of Quoddy, a manufacturer of hand-sewn moccasins and boots. Eighteen burly French-Canadian men, some of them fourth-generation hand sewers, sat hunched over weathered workbenches, stitching together stiff patterns of leather with lengths of waxed thread. Drexler and the team had decided that it would be a brilliant idea to load one of these men, bench and all, into a truck sometime this fall and install him in the window of the men’s store in SoHo. “That would be _in_sane,” Drexler said. “I have such a newfound respect—I’m thinking, the shoes.”

His expression, as he toured the floor, was one of astonished delight, as though in recognition of the incongruity of his presence in this Piltdown place. “It’s amazing to see this,” Drexler said. “This should almost be an orientation tour for every new J. Crew employee.” For lunch, the Quoddy C.E.O., John Andreliunas, a trim, sardonic former Nike executive, had ordered up a delivery of hot dogs known in these parts as “snappers”; in keeping with local custom, they were the color of grenadine. Integrity or not, it was clear, even as the team put a few back while standing, that snappers wouldn’t appear in the J. Crew catalogue anytime soon. But the team loved the boots, which retailed for four hundred dollars. As they ate, they talked about Quoddy’s styles. Drexler had this exercise he’d been doing, in which, when discussing a certain item or idea, he’d hold his hand out, palm down, and then raise it slowly, like a needle on a gauge, until his hand reached the angle that approximated everyone’s view of whether, and how steeply, the popularity of the item or style was going up and down. I’d seen him do it for everything from tattersall to Lady Gaga. He asked his team about Quoddy, “Which way is the trend going? Tell me when to stop.” Everyone said “Stop!” when the hand was pointed up at an angle of about seventy degrees.

“Let’s just do a Quoddy thing,” Drexler said. “Let’s just do a Quoddy thing. We need to tell the story of Quoddy. We need to tell the story of Quoddy. We need to—O.K.?” ♦

Nick Paumgarten has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 2005.